I came across Korean artist Jung Lee on Design Milk, which featured an article about Lee a few years back. The article was featured work from two of her series, “Day and Night” and “Aporia” (“coming to a dead end”), which were being displayed in Dubai for the first time a few years ago.
Says Design Milk:
The Aporia series was inspired by Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discoursem which tells the story of the ineptitudes of people in love. According to Barthes, when one falls in love the beloved becomes a mystery and one will ceaselessly try to figure out the reasons for their mysterious feelings. The desire to express one’s love produces lies and conflicts leading to a dead end. For Lee, those empty phrases reveal the solitude and sorrow of modern people today.
In the works entitled Day and Night, Lee focused on ‘God’ and ‘Love’ as the two main words reflecting her interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy where he highlighted the belief that true faith and love would lead you to heaven. Lee produces a cluster of those “divine” words and places them floating over the sea as reproductions or in a heap, demonstrating one’s desire to salvation. Thus Lee’s constructed photographs evoke amorous intensity with a coolness that enables the viewers to find their own way into this world, to have their memories stirred, to consider what it means to be alive in time.1
Although this exhibition is already a few years old, the intension behind both the Aporia Series and Day and Night are just as relevant today as they were during the beginning of their creation in 2010.
Sources:
1: Neon Type Installations in Nature by Jung Lee
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